Many voters say they don’t want a convicted felon in the White House. But do they mean it? And can prosecutors get to trial before the vote?
Can anything stop former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign juggernaut, now that Trump has all but crushed his GOP primary opponents and pulled ahead of President Joe Biden in national polls?
While November is a long time away, and plenty could happen before then, voters do say Trump has a massive weakness: A potential criminal conviction. In poll after poll, lots of voters who shrug off Trump’s four indictments say they wouldn’t support him if he’s convicted of a felony. If they mean it—or even if a big chunk of them do—they could easily be enough to keep him out of the White House.
What remains to be seen, of course, is whether they mean it—and, crucially, whether prosecutors can put Trump on trial in time for the rest of us to find out.
That makes prosecutors’ race against the clock one of the most important narratives of the 2024 election cycle, as teams of lawyers work feverishly around the country to overcome Trump’s efforts to gum up the gears of the judicial system and push the start-date of all his trials past November.
I’d like to think that the mere fact that Trump is facing this absolute litany of charges would be enough to drive any reasonable people away in droves, but clearly that applies too much rational thought for many of my fellow countrymen
Everyone who could be swayed has already been peeled away or never voted for him in the first place. All that’s left are the people who would vote for literally any Republican and those who think God sent him.
Getting it to trial before the election is not the issue, getting the conviction and sentencing will be.
Criminal trials aren’t going to be like the in and out civil trials where he has already been found liable and they just need to determine by how much (E. Jean Carroll and the Trump Org, or even the Rudy Giuliani defamation trial). There was no question of guilt or innocence.
His lawyers will, and already have, pull every trick in the book to delay, delay, delay.
If you’re trying to keep track of where we’re at in the Trump prosecutions:
Updated 01/29/2024
Washington, D.C.
4 federal felonies
January 6th Election Interference
Investigation
Indictment
Arrest <- You Are Here
Trial - March 4th, 2024, one day before Super Tuesday primaries.
Jack Smith had requested that the Supreme Court immediately rule on Trump’s immunity defense, the Court rejected the request, requiring it to go through the usual appeals process first.
Conviction
Sentencing
New York
34 state felonies
Stormy Daniels Payoff
Investigation
Indictment
Arrest <- You Are Here
Trial - March 25th, 2024
Conviction
Sentencing
Florida
40 federal felonies
Top Secret Documents charges
Investigation
Indictment
Original indictment was for 37 felonies.
3 new felonies were added on July 27, 2023.
Arrest <- You Are Here
Trial - May 20, 2024
Conviction
Sentencing
Georgia
13 state felonies
Election Interference
Investigation
Indictment
Arrest <- You Are Here
All 19 defendants have surrendered.
Trial - A trial date of Aug. 5, 2024 has been requested, not approved yet.
Three defendants, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and bail bondsman Scott Hall, have all pled guilty and have agreed to testify in other cases.
The judge in the case has set a deadline of December 1st for all motions to be filed, expect a trial date at some point after that.
Conviction
Sentencing
Other grand juries, such as for the documents at Bedminster, or the Arizona fake electors, have not been announced.
The E. Jean Carroll trial for sexual assault and defamation where Trump was found liable and ordered to pay $5 million before immediately defaming her again resulting in a demand for $10 million is not listed as it’s a civil case and not a crimimal one. He was found liable in that case for $83.3 million.
As a function of the January 6th and Georgia trials, there are now lawsuits in two states to bar Trump from the primary ballot based on the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Colorado:
12/19/23 - The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that Trump is not eligible for the primary ballot due to being barred by the 14th Amendment as an insurrectionist.
Minnesota:
11/8/2023 - State Supreme Court denies challenge, allows ballot access.
A long-shot write in candidate for President has also filed suits seeking to bar Trump from the ballot in Florida, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
His cases in Arizona, California, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and West Virginia have been thrown out:
https://www.wmur.com/article/new-hampshire-donald-trump-ballot-lawsuit-dismiss/45682757
He’s already a convicted rapist and no one seems to care on the right.
TeChNiCaLlY, unless I missed something big, he wasn’t convicted of the rape. That requires a criminal trial. A jury did find that he raped her as a material fact in a civil trial, so we can say with legal certainty that it happened, but until an actual conviction, it will be used as a excuse to avoid holding him to account for it. Of course a bunch of the right are the type to blame the victim or wave it off entirely for that particular crime anyway so I don’t know how much difference even a conviction would make to them.
thank you for the clarification. Looking into definitions, evidently the word “convicted” only refers to criminal proceedings, as you say.
Yeah you’re right and I think we’re looking for civily liable instead of conviction in this scenario - not that it should make a difference.
But just to avoid being overtechnical, if you want to say Trump raped Carroll, you can accurately say so:
A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.
The filing from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan came as Trump’s attorneys have sought a new trial and have argued that the jury’s $5 million verdict against Trump in the civil suit was excessive. The reason, they argue, is that sexual abuse could be as limited as the “groping” of a victim’s breasts.
Kaplan roundly rejected Trump’s motion Tuesday, calling that argument “entirely unpersuasive.”
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ” Kaplan wrote.
He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/
While November is a long time away, and plenty could happen before then, voters do say Trump has a massive weakness: A potential criminal conviction. In poll after poll, lots of voters who shrug off Trump’s four indictments say they wouldn’t support him if he’s convicted of a felony.
The Muller report was supposed to bring about the end of his presidency after having exposed his corruption and his crimes. A GOP base that has painted Russia as a boogeyman since at least the Cold War certainly wouldn’t tolerate a President suddenly colluding with the enemy, right? Right? Oh, wait. That’s right. Nobody cared.
January 6th was supposed to be the day the GOP said they had enough of Trump and it was time to move on from him. They literally stood in the House and Senate and said as much. And it took days before people like McCarthy were literally travelling back to Maralago to beg for forgiveness. From Trump. The insurrection is now viewed as little more than a peaceful demonstration and those involved are now considered ‘hostages’ from those exact same people.
The J6 hearings were supposed to present the case to the American people about how dangerous Trump was. Surely, once they saw the evidence for themselves, his base would…never mind. They wrote the whole thing off as a Democrat witch hunt.
But if criminal charges were brought against Trump, that would have to be enough! All we need is just one AG to pull the trigger. Other states would follow, and we’d be spending 2024 watching Trump squirm in courtroom after courtroom desperately trying to hang on to his freedom and his relevancy in front of judges and juries who…oh, that’s right. They’ve all just bent over for Trump at every possible opportunity, giving him exactly what he wants out of literal fear of retribution from his base. And the impact at the polls? Nonexistent as his base just wrote it off as an issue between him and a pornstar who is too unimportant to matter anyway.
Hey, you say, the other states did follow suit and start filing charges after Bragg got the ball rolling. How’s that working out? One judge has already professed to being in his pocket, has stated that she believes Trump deserves special treatment just for being Trump, and has deferred to Trump at literally every opportunity even at the risk of her professional reputation. The GA case is being dismissed by his base as political persecution by a DA who was having an affair, and the DC case is dragging its feet. And Trump’s polls have done nothing but go up, not down, with every court appearance as he has successfully been able to turn his court appearances into glorified campaign rallies as the judges just sit there and let it happen. (He has used his time on the stand and even took time during closing arguments to make political speeches and statements even after repeatedly being warned not to by the judges. And in every case, the judges decided not to follow through on their threats).
At this point, there is zero reason to believe a conviction would hurt him at all. In fact, he’d probably go up 5 points. His base is all in, and they’re barely even trying to hide the fact that it’s a cult at this point. They’re starting to go on TV and say the quiet part out loud: Trump is their leader, and if they have to choose between Trump and the founding principles of this country, they’ve chosen Trump.
I am very used to this arguing against Conservatives in Canada. The Canadian government is… Let’s just say generally less inflammatory and complicated than the American system because “states rights” are less of a duel between systems and more of a handshake.
All Conservatives have to do is throw wood on the fire of the fairly naturally occuring suspicion that a government isn’t following it’s own rules. To have those doubts takes no effort. People naturally resent being told what to do by an authority. Understanding how law works, what checks a government has on itself or understanding where an opinion is coming from and it’s place in the system is the antidote to understanding that your average Canadian does not live in a tyranny (Indigenous people do. Questions of whether stolen sovereignty and genocide makes power ultimately ethically legitimate is a whole different kettle of fish and we got more than a little reconciliation to do on that front. )
Take the trucker convoy that blockaded Ottawa for infectious disease restrictions. People were up in arms about the tyranny of the Federal government… But check the facts and understand the ecosystem that move is in the whole “we have no rights!” reaction starts sounding like bullshit.
The exercise of one of the harshest anti-sedition emergency protections existing in Canadian law that has never been used got activated for the first time. It required both provincial and federal governments to vote it in. It can remain active for a maximum of 90 days but was only active for less than 2 weeks.
The act required an independent inquiry be launched the moment it was voted in with the result presented before Parliament within a year. The people writing up the report for presentation had concern the French language half of the report (all official documents have to be in French and English in Canada) had concerns it would be up to standard so they put in for a paperwork duedate extension to the federal government that had to vote on whether that was okay before the deadline which ended up not being a problem anyway. The report does seem to show that the council the government recieved from Canadian intelligence and police had fairly high concerns of the level of armed civilians in the convoy, the large amount of money coming in from far right groups in the US and the blockade style seige that would impact the welfare and food security of the average citizenship of the places the blockades were in place.
The second half is that after this report launched a Court Justice raised concerns with the report about whether some of the actions taken were an over reach on Charter protections (Think the Canadian version of the Constitution) so the whole report will be reviewed by the Justices of the Supreme Courts with the Canadian government body as a defendant. If they lose this opens the Government to being sued by citizens for damages and creates needed precedent for the execution of the Emergencies Act.
This isn’t a tyranny. It’s a beaurcratic system working as intended. This is a government BEING a government. But all the Conservative media needs to do is withhold context. That paperwork extention request is suddenly “the government not playing by it’s own rules because it extended the act for more time without a vote”. The justice who raised concerns to trigger the full panel review of the report is " definitive proof the government did wrong!"
Conservative politicians here want people to believe they live under a tyranny because they are the opposition and they are gunna be slimy to try and get more seats at the next election… And it’s easy because understanding law in context even under easy baby mode here in Canada requires dedication to learn and understand complicated structures and how the law works on both a technical and philosophical level. They aren’t interested in educating people why this is normal. It doesn’t behoove them to do so.
I don’t believe it. Anybody who today is planning to vote for that moron probably also believes that every single charge is part of some elaborate witch hunt.
There is not one reasonable, rational person who is still backing Trump.
